New Treatment for Cluster Headaches

March 8, 2007 -- There is new hope for sufferers of an excruciatingly painful type of headache who get no relief from drugs.

Two newly published studies show a minimally invasive nerve stimulation procedure to be a safe and effective alternative to surgery for many patients with drug-resistant cluster headaches.

The pain associated with cluster headaches is considered to be among the worst that a human can experience. Sufferers often report relentless, intense burning or stabbing pain located behind one eye, generally lasting from 30 minutes to 90 minutes and recurring several times a day.

“The only suicides I have ever seen due to headaches are in people who get cluster headaches. That is how painful they are,” National Headache Foundation executive chairman Seymour Diamond, MD, tells WebMD. “That is why some people call them ‘the suicide headache.’”

Drugs Help Most Patients

Most cluster headache sufferers respond to drug treatments designed to prevent attacks or minimize their intensity. But the options for those who don’t respond are few, and those options are associated with troubling and even potentially life-threatening side effects, says neurologist Peter J. Goadsby, MD, PhD, of the U.K. Institute of Neurology.

Patients who are not helped with less-invasive treatments may opt for surgery to destroy nerves in the brain that carry pain signals to the face. The surgery is permanent, and it doesn’t always work, Goadsby tells WebMD.

“We really need to do better by these patients,” he says. “There is no place in modern headache treatment for destructive procedures like these.”

New Hope

Goadsby decided to try a technique known as occipital nerve stimulation after seeing how well the therapy worked in other hard-to-treat head pain patients.

Eight patients with chronic cluster headaches who got little relief from drug treatments were recruited for the trial.

The procedure involves positioning a fine electrode under the skin at the base of the skull. This is attached to a wire leading to a pacemaker-like device implanted elsewhere in the body. An external generator controls the degree of stimulation the patients receive.